Information is growing rapidly as evidenced by the ever-increasing amount a web pages. For example, the entire content of the Web doubled this year, and is expected to increase five-fold over the next two years. While the amount of content and information is staggering, getting to desired content can be a difficult and frustrating task.
As the content of the public Internet grows, so does the internal content of enterprise Intranets. Many companies have on-line sources for benefits and other resources available to employees. One example is that of Human Resources (HR).
However, presently existing interfaces are often troublesome. In many cases, an employee may not even know how to frame the proper question in the context of a standard search query. Ultimately, the employee may get frustrated enough to pick up the phone and ask the question directly to HR staff, thus rendering the effort to create the on-line presence a waste.
Recently, some companies have attempted to bring intelligence to their online presences. “Virtual people” have begun to appear on web sites that “speak” in response to the user's input. However, one drawback of present systems is that they suffer from the fact that they access a very limited pool of information that is static in nature, and do not scale as new information becomes available. Furthermore, they are not intelligent in that they do not learn from past interactions.